Hi, all. I have in mind a quote from Yeats that says something to the effect of, a poem should click shut at the end like the top of a well made box.

A Google search on "yeats poem click shut box" yields numerous versions of the phrase (many of them differing from each other, most of them in quotation marks) but none of the links that I've seen have cited where Yeats said this, and without that info it's hard to tell what the actual quote is.

Anyway, I'm planning to use the quotation in an essay I'm writing and I'd like to cite chapter and verse when I do it. Does anybody know from whence the quotation comes, and what Yeats really said?

Interestingly, what I'm finding suggests that the original statement is not about the conclusions of poems but about knowing when they're finished. This is given as the full sentence from which the phrase is taken:

"The correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is endless, a poem comes right with a click like a closing box."

And while I can't find the whole letter quoted anywhere, more than one source says that it's from a letter of Yeats to his friend Dorothy Wellesley (sp? I can't just go back with my browser or I'll lose this post. Rats. I've forgotten the date too--maybe 1935?)

But this too is the result googling. Maybe we'll get where we need to be by piling up google results.

If memory serves, the quote you require also appears in A General Introduction for my Work, reprinted in his Collected Essays and Introduction, or something like that....But memory does not always serve...

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited January 22, 2008).]